Message Views Coming to Mozilla in 1.3 Alpha

Monday November 4th, 2002

Seth Spitzer has posted a message to netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news about a new feature for Mail & Newsgroups known as 'message views'. The feature, coded by Scott "mscott" MacGregor, allows you to apply what are essentially saved searches to your mail folders and subscribed newsgroups. By default, several message views will be defined, including 'People I Know' (messages from people in your Personal Address Book), 'Not Junk' (which will be enabled when the spam filtering feature has landed) and the self-explanatory 'All' and 'Unread'. There's also views for each of your message labels and you'll be able to create your own views using a dialogue similar to the Search Messages UI. For more details, read the relevant thread in netscape.public.mozilla.mail-news or take a look at the bug, which includes a couple of pretty screenshots.

This is great. I've been designing an email app as my pet project for quite some time where all folders are virtual and just a result of stored search rules. It's great to see it coming to Mozilla. Many people who use Outlook totally love its "views" feature and I understand it was very liked in BeOS where the idea was even further extended.

What bothers me, though, is that the Mail & News client UI is of quite poor quality. Probably the most obvious is the "Get Messages" button which seems to NOT be working more often that it's working. I can't believe that major new features are being worked on when there are so clear broken features (that have been broken for litterally years) in the application.

I did a search and these might be what macpeep is talking about.
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=89404 "get all new messages" should never be disabled
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=127461 Get New Messages stops working for one account

While I'm at it this one is annoying two. :)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=170669 Manually clicking 'Get new messages' duplicates custom headers in filters

Here's a tracking bug for get messages:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=165832
If you're looking for really serious mail bugs you might want to check this one as well:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=142196

I recall somebody (Blake?) saying in a thread about Thunderbird/Minotaur in the Phoenix forums that MozMail wasn't going anywhere. This gives the lie to that dis .
As to that criticism of the UI, isn't it really just a matter of which mail client somebody got used to way back when? I cannot comprehend the fanaticism for Mulberry's UI, just as some cannot understand my fondness of Mahogany's. And I still think that Ami 1.0 is the best word processor.
But, this is why it is so great that these projects are open -- somebody can take the code and do it the way they think right!

I don't think the criticism is about what the UI looks like but the quality of it. Things are broken (such as the Get Msgs button), widgets are seemingly just thrown out at random places in dialogs with random borders without any consistency (just about any dialog in the Mail & News app), etc.

Hm? Probably I didn't get what you want to say, but the IMAP related source files I've found are either under the NPL/GPL/LGPL or MPL/GPL/LGPL and therefore open. Or are you talking about something different?

Hm, maybe it's me but I was under the impression that you can't check Netscape's webmail with
mozilla, but again, maybe I'm off track here. Wasn't there something you need from AOL/Netscape but that isn't part (yet) of mozilla because of license stuff?

Mozilla handles IMAP fine. I've been using Mozilla'a IMAP functionality for several years and it works great. Mozilla operates with the IMAP standard just fine. That means we work with any IMAP servers that do IMAP appropriately. Netscape Webmail is not straight IMAP. Netscape webmail uses some proprietary stuff and IMAP, support for the proprietary stuff isn't in the Mozilla tree and probably shouldn't be. We don't support any of the other proprietary webmail mess either. We do POP and IMAP as the standards are written. If your webmail offers real IMAP or real POP services then Mozilla will work with that. I don't think that it's a very good idea to add a bunch of code to support one non-standard email server. If someone did an implementation I'd recommend taking it to mozdev.org and making it into an extension/plugin.

Of course, Yahoo POP is plain vanilla POP -- if you pay. All three programs can grab mail, display and respond using MozMail or most other POP mail clients. I'd guess the same method could be used to grab Netscape mail to display in POP clients.
I oughta add that, for me, they don't work well and are very slow.

It's disappointing to see so little involvement in Mozilla Calendar (by NS or others). Interoperation between mail and calendar is creeping along, but a full-featured multi-user calendar that interacts naturally with the rest of the mozilla suite would give the Mozilla mail client a LOT more momentum.